


Wings

by Overlithe



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming of Age, F/F, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Military Academy, Mother-Son Relationship, Mystery, New Republic Defence Fleet Academy, Origin Story, University
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 19:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6578890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlithe/pseuds/Overlithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>19-year-old Poe Dameron is finally where he’s wanted to be all his life: a newly-admitted cadet at the New Republic Defence Fleet Academy. Life at the Academy comes with new friends and new challenges, but his training isn’t the only reason he’s made the trip to the Core Worlds—and trying to unearth a long-buried secret may come at too high a price.</p><p>A college/university story, only it’s X-Wing University and there’s also a good dose of mystery and action/adventure. Gen with a little F/F and M/M romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wings

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank SW:TFA for finally allowing me to write the obligatory college AU, only it’s actually canon and it’s in space and there are robots and explosions, which I feel is something that should be included in all university/college fics. Poe’s family and background and Karé, Iolo, and Muran come from _Star Wars: Shattered Empire_ and _Before the Awakening_. I’ve also used details from other tie-in works and the old Legends EU, however my approach was that of a demented magpie (take whatever makes sense and looks shiny! discard the rest!) and of course this doesn’t incorporate anything released from March 2016 onwards, so you definitely don’t need to be familiar with any tie-in works to read and fully understand this fic. As long as you watched SW:TFA, you’re good to go! :) Updates should be posted every 3/4 weeks. My life being what it is, I can’t promise I will be able to stick faithfully to this schedule, but I will do my best!
> 
> Many thanks to my partner in crime, **muffinbitch** , without whom the whole idea for this story wouldn’t even exist, and who has dedicated an amazing amount of time to helping me out with these adorkable space babies.

**1\. A No-Funny-Business Kind of Deal**

When their pilot quit halfway through the trip to the Hosnian System, Poe tried not to see it as a bad omen. They were travelling in an old Mandalorian light freighter that had been decommissioned and recommissioned so many times Poe wasn’t entirely sure of the base coat’s colour, and from his seat he had both a great view of the twin suns beating down on the permacrete of the Huron V spaceport, and of the argument going on amidst their crew.

The acoustics, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired. His seat-mate was a Besalisk who always kept the volume on her Ybella 3000 turned all the way up and who was apparently incompatible with earbuds. Poe hadn’t really heard Besalisk music before, but by now he had caught up on it so thoroughly that he was sure he was going to die with it still playing in a continuous loop inside his head.

‘Ladies and gentlemen and all sentients,’ the head mechanic was saying as she stepped onto the main deck, ‘I’m sad to say we won’t be going any further.’ She didn’t sound all that sad.

A chorus of groans and less humanoid sounds rose inside the passengers’ cabin. Some people started arguing with the mechanic while she talked about partial refunds and alternate arrangements in a flat monotone that slowly increased in volume. Poe’s seat-mate just let out a resigned huff, grabbed her luggage from one of the storage compartments, and joined the knot of people making their way to the freighter’s exits.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. Nobody paid him any mind. He reached into another storage compartment, grabbed his case, and stepped out into the aisle, following the flash of purple of the mechanic’s lekku through the throng. Someone bumped into him. He squirmed past them. ‘Excuse me.’

He reached the mechanic just as she was about to walk down an exit ramp. ‘Excuse me,’ Poe repeated as he brushed her sleeve.

The Twi’lek turned around to glare at him.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ he said, and her expression softened a fraction, though she still looked like someone who’d accidentally swallowed a viper wasp. ‘But I need to get to the Hosnian System.’

She sighed. ‘Yeah, well, and I need to inherit a million credits, kid, but apparently that’s not happening either.’ She glanced down at the ramp, then swore and took off at a trot down it. Wrench-head or no, she still moved in the most graceful way Poe had ever seen, so that it looked like whoever was at the bottom of the ramp was about to be attacked by a vicious and very purple whisper bird. ‘Hey, sleemo, you can’t leave these here!’

Poe hurried down the ramp after her, his suitcase bouncing against his thigh. Someone had left several cages containing tip-yips on the ground by the freighter. One of the cages had broken open and two of the birds were wandering around, clucking distressedly at the permacrete. ‘Tell it to my boss, tailhead!’ a man yelled at the mechanic while he walked towards the foamcast buildings at the other end of the runways, then punctuated his sentence with a hand gesture. Poe had never seen that one before, but he was sure he got the gist of what it meant.

‘By the soul of…’ the mechanic grumbled under her breath. One of the tip-yips flapped over her boot.

Poe looked at the scrubland hills enclosing the spaceport, hazy in a heat that was dry and hard and nothing like Yavin’s, and tried to tune out the Besalisk music still going strong behind his temples.

After he’d received his acceptance from the Academy he’d—well, the very first thing he’d done had been a little victory dance right in front of the woolaroos, who’d glanced up from the auto-waterer with a supremely unimpressed look. The second thing had been to go to the small hangar next to the storage sheds and pat the fuselage of his mother’s A-wing, as though the old ship would understand everything through the skin of his hand. But not long after, he and his father had scrolled through the ‘Net pages listing the routes from Yavin 4 to the Hosnian System, joking about the expensive tickets they were pretending to buy.

‘How about this cruise to Naboo?’ Kes had said. ‘Sure, it’ll mean doubling back, but think of the comfort of having your own personal droid valet.’

‘Sorry, won’t settle for anything less than gilded krayt eggs every day.’

They chuckled together at that, then Kes turned more serious as he tapped the computer screen and pulled up the HoloNet page listing the details of flights leaving from space station _Pride of Felucia_. ‘Here: hyperjump straight to Hosnian Prime. You’ll need to fly to the station, but it looks like the quickest way.’

Poe looked at the listing for the transporter—it was CEC-made, and he would love to see if it handled as smooth as it looked—then at the number of zeroes next to the credit-sign on the ticket’s price-tag. The most he could say for it was that it looked like a bargain compared to the overpriced tourist ships that would intermittently ferry people in and out of Yavin so they could gawk at the Massassi ruins or what was left of the old Alliance HQ. ‘Felucia?’ he said.

‘Come on.’ Kes’s grin was lightning-quick. ‘We can afford it.’

Poe dry-swallowed. He knew his father had a little money set aside, and he knew where most of that came from.

He also knew he shouldn’t take it, not for this. He couldn’t explain why, wasn’t sure he could even put it in words—he just knew it would be _wrong_ , in the same way old spacers said they could feel an incoming ion storm under the skin before any instruments flagged it up.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘No need to waste the creds—someone who’s shipping out is bound to be hiring.’

‘No, no waste. Don’t worry about it, we’ll buy you a ticket.’ Kes’s tone was unchanged, calm and a little breezy, but Poe could practically hear the _and that’s that, Poe Dameron_ dangling unspoken at the end of the sentence.

Poe opened his mouth, managed to think better of it, then reached forward to tap across to a different set of flights, the mixed-use freighters ferrying about the kind of passengers who didn’t mind sharing with 50 cubic metres of dried tentacled eels.

‘How about these?’

Kes frowned. ‘Are you sure? Those stop on every rock on the way.’

‘As long as they get there.’ Poe grinned. ‘Besides, that way I’d get to see the galaxy.’

As it turned out, the galaxy seemed to consist mostly of spaceports that served terrible caf, and now a flat expanse of permacrete in Huron V.

‘Sorry,’ Poe said to the mechanic. ‘He shouldn’t have said that.’

She looked like she was about to say something, but sighed and shrugged instead. ‘Don’t apologise, kid. You weren’t the one who said it.’

One of the tip-yips pecked at Poe’s shoe. ‘I really need—’

‘I know, I know. Hosnian System. Look, your ticket’s still good.’ She leaned down to fiddle with the cage’s lock. ‘There should be another ship bound for the system in two standard days. One with a pilot that doesn’t quit.’

‘Two days? I can’t wait two days. I’m already late as it is.’

The mechanic didn’t seem too moved by that. She scooped up one of the tip-yips and handed it to Poe. ‘Here. Hold this for me, will ya?’ she said as she stuffed the squawking bird under Poe’s arm.

‘Wait,’ he said as the mechanic started to walk away. The tip-yip tried to squirm out of his grip. ‘The ship is good, right? All you need is a pilot.’

‘Yeah?’ She let out a dismissive snort and kept moving towards the landing struts. ‘Are you going to fly it, kid?’

‘Why not? I have a commercial pilot’s license.’ _And I’m a damn good one_ , he thought, but didn’t say it.

She examined one of the struts, but Poe could tell he had at least some of her attention. She spoke again. ‘Full or—’

‘Full.’

‘Are you even bond—’

‘Yavin Shipping & Transport Allied. Will they do?’

The mechanic unhooked a fibre-mesh cloth from her belt and wiped her hands on it, unhurried. ‘I can fly freighters,’ Poe added, and when she finally looked at him, he couldn’t help but be reminded of the time one of his teachers had told him “you always have a lid for every pot”, which sounded like a compliment but was actually supposed to be bad for some reason.

He straightened up and tried to look as dignified as possible, which was easier said than done when you were holding a temperamental Endorian chicken under one arm. He wondered if he should smile and decided to go for it.

It didn’t seem to help.

‘How old are you, kid? Eighteen?’

‘Nineteen,’ Poe said, a little huffily.

She looked back at the landing strut and pulled a small-gauge hydrospanner from her tool harness. ‘So you’ve flown freighters, huh?’

‘I’ve flown all kinds of ships.’

A few moments passed as the mechanic uncoupled a hydraulic tube, flushed it, and reattached it. The tip-yip let out a couple of indignant _bawks_. ‘Done a lot of deep space jumps?’

‘Sure. Loads,’ Poe said.

The Twi’lek looked at him. Poe felt himself flush, but with any luck, it wasn’t showing. ‘Anyone ever tell you you’re a great liar, kid?’

‘No?’ He couldn’t help but feel a little flattered.

‘Yeah, I’m not surprised.’

‘Oh.’

She moved on to the next landing strut and Poe followed, balancing his luggage and the tip-yip. ‘OK, so I haven’t done a lot of deep space jumps, but I’ve done enough to know how to do them. You’re just gonna have to wait around for someone you can hire, anyway.’

‘You get me to Hosnian Prime, I’m still going to have to hire someone there.’ She grabbed a handhold on the strut so she could hoist herself up and take a look at the underside. ‘And the owner is a tight-strap, believe me.’

Her lekku bounced a little inside their bindings as she worked, just a few steps away from Poe’s face, and he wondered if the polite thing to do would be to look away. ‘I’ll fly for free.’

The mechanic jumped back down to the ground. ‘What did you say?’

She made it sound like he’d just stuck his foot in it. ‘You don’t have to pay me. I need to get there and—’

The mechanic grabbed his shoulders, which agitated the tip-yip. ‘Why didn’t you say so? Kid, you’ve got yourself a deal.’

***

In the end, not a lot of passengers took advantage of the opportunity to reboard the transport and jump straight to the Hosnian System. It had to be, Poe kept telling himself, because not a lot of people were travelling all the way to Hosnian Prime in the first place, and not at all due to a collective vote of no-confidence in his flying skills.

That was definitely what was going on. Definitely.

‘I thought you said you knew how to fly freighters, kid.’

‘Trust me, I can do it. Just making sure I’m getting it right—first time on a Mandalorian one.’ He heard her swear under her breath. ‘And my name’s Poe, by the way. Poe Dameron.’

‘Good for you,’ she said as she sat on one of the crew chairs in the (bird-free) cockpit. ‘Name’s Eeana,’ she added, sounding like she was doing so at blaster-point.

‘Nice to meet you, Eeana,’ he said, and glanced away from the control panels, in time to see her finish buckling her seat belt. ‘You don’t have to stay here with me. These freighters don’t need a co-pilot.’

‘Ha. Just making sure you don’t bust up the old rustbucket too much.’

 _Right_. He looked back at the dizzying array of switches and buttons in front of him. They were labelled half in Aurebesh, half in Mandalorian script, but since he didn’t speak a word of Mando’a, he supposed it didn’t really make any difference.

His lungs drew in a breath, then his hand went to the section where he knew the controls for the ship’s power systems had to be. _If we couldn’t fly them, they wouldn’t build them_ , his mother said in his head, like she’d had dozens of times before. He couldn’t remember the exact sound of her voice, not anymore, but the memory—Shara sitting halfway out of the cockpit of the old Interceptor, a loose lock of curly hair caught on the collar of her flight suit—was still vivid enough to drown out the endless loop of Besalisk music for a few seconds.

Flip, flip, flip. Buttons lit up on the control panels as he brought the ship’s systems—electrical, electronics, telemetry—to life one by one, even if some of the switches weren’t where he was expecting them to be. The nav computer’s screens lit up with a whirr of the cooling pumps.

And today must be shaping up to be lucky after all, because the comms system was as standard as it got.

‘Huron V—’ He thought for a second. ‘—Beta-seven-seven Spaceport, this is freighter…’ Blast, the ship’s name was written in Mando’a on the tag.

‘ _One Taar_ ,’ Eeana supplied from her seat. She sounded amused.

‘ _One Taar_ ,’ Poe repeated, ‘call sign four-zero-six niner-four-delta.’ The tag was standard laser-etched durasteel, but some of the symbols were faded enough he had to squint a little. ‘Reporting crew change and requesting VTO and IF clearance, DSJ to the Hosnian System, Hosnian Prime approach OP traffic-space.’

There was a split-second’s crackle before ground control answered. ‘Beta-seven-seven clearance, copy that, _One Taar_ niner-four-delta,’ an older male voice said, speaking Basic with a lilt Poe hadn’t heard before. ‘Standing by for your pilot registration number.’

‘Beta-seven-seven clearance, that’s yirt-for-young, vev-for-victory, three-three-zero-six-two-five-seven-eight.’ As he spoke he touched the steering yoke, the heavy, lumbering kind shaped like wings with two auxiliary joysticks. The speaking part of his mind was paying attention to ground control, but the rest of him was listening to the ship, his flesh and blood and bones feeling it rumble slowly to life all around him as he switched on the fuel injectors, warmed up the thrusters, brought the twin gravity engines to standby mode.

‘ _One Taar_ niner-four-delta, we’re reading… Poe… Dameron on our end.’ They managed to mispronounce both his names, which he was pretty sure was a first.

‘Roger that, beta-seven-seven clearance, ready to copy VTO and IF clearance,’ he said. Outside the cockpit’s viewports, the sky was a hard, unbroken blue, and he could picture the stars above it, stretching into infinity. Inside, while he went through the rest of the takeoff procedure and finished setting the new course in the nav computer, his palms itched and his stomach knotted up in the familiar way. That would stop happening once he was a fighter pilot, he was sure.

‘ _One Taar_ niner-four-delta, winds one one zero at twelve, cleared for VTO,’ ground control said.

‘Cleared for VTO runway one-four, _One Taar_ niner-four-delta,’ Poe repeated back to the controller, and with a loud rumble of the auxiliary thrusters, they were off the ground, rising up, up, up into the air, into the golden haze of the suns. The winds hit just where ground control said, making one of the joysticks shudder a little in Poe’s hand, and he was already figuring out that the ship had a nasty little habit of pulling to the left. Still, it flew like a gonk droid falling down a flight of stairs, clunky and inelegant but the sort of thing that pretty much kept going once you got it started. All he needed to do was bank a little, hands firmly on the controls and an eye on the gyro, and they sailed through and past the turbulence without a hiccup. He spoke into the comm link again. ‘Huron V beta-seven-seven departure, _One Taar_ niner-four-delta, six thousand and climbing into the black, nothing but blue skies.’

Through the viewports, the horizon receded as they pulled up and the sky darkened to deep, cloudless blue, and finally to airless black and a strip of light and atmosphere. The nav computer was scrolling through instructions for the gravity engines, but looking at it would take too long, and Poe guided himself by the altimeter and the pull he could feel through the layers of the ship’s hull, pinning him down to his seat.

The planet’s gravity was fighting for them, trying to drag them back to the ground. It should win—it should be impossible for huge chunks of metal and bolts to swoop and fly higher and faster than birds, but then they were off-planet, utterly free for that tiniest moment before his body adjusted to the ship’s artificial gravity, under an endless canopy of distant stars, and Poe felt like whooping with joy, same as always, no matter how many dozens of times he’d done it before.

Maybe that would also go away once he was at the Academy, he thought as he contacted departure control, then swept around in a wide arc as he waited for clearance to jump into hyperspace. In the viewport, morning was breaking across the yellow-green surface of Huron V, the twin suns turning the alien oceans gold and silver. His mother’s voice again: _Nothing can beat that view_. The words never sounded the same in Basic.

‘Jumping to hyperspace in two,’ he said, and gave the yoke a pull so the ship rode right over the shuddery _snap_ when they moved out of realspace and everything outside the viewports turned to a blur.

‘That was… a pretty smooth ride, kid,’ Eeana said after a moment, sounding like she didn’t quite believe it.

‘Thanks,’ he said, and let himself look around the cockpit. The automated course would take them through some of the bigger hyperspace routes, so the trip wouldn’t last very long even with a Class 3 hyperdrive, but even so Eeana unfastened her seatbelt and leaned back in her chair.

The Besalisk music had started playing in his head again by the time she broke the silence. ‘Why’re you in such a hurry to get to Hosnian Prime, anyway?’

‘I’m not going to stay in Hosnian Prime. I’m going to the Defence Fleet Academy on Hosnian Two.’

‘Oh. You in the service, then?’

‘Not yet. But I’m going to be a starfighter pilot like my mother.’

‘Good for you,’ she said, unimpressed, before pulling out a small and battered datapad from one of her pouches. Whatever she was looking at, it couldn’t be very engrossing; it didn’t take long for her to raise her head a fraction and speak again. ‘Hey, did you see the news about that mess in the Neryan System?’

Poe had watched a news report on the viewscreens in the spaceport before Huron V. He’d only caught the tail end of it, before the programme had cut to an ad for the new Big Bantha Burger, now available at your local Slusho, but he’d still seen enough to learn four pilots had been killed. ‘Yeah, I did.’

‘Makes you think twice about joining up, uh?’

‘Not really.’

The mechanic raised one of her perfectly arched Twi’lek eyebrows and smoothed her lekku over her shoulder, but said nothing. Poe wondered if she thought he was either an idiot or just someone whistling past the rancor, but in reality he was (he hoped) neither. He knew people died, and he knew it was never pretty. It was just that—

He felt a pull behind his navel a split-second before the bright yellow notification popped up on the nav computer’s screen. They were coming out of hyperspace, and just as the hyperdrive came offline, Poe applied a little counter-thrust to keep the ship from pulling up and left as it returned to cruising speed. Soon enough, the colours around them finished blueshifting back to normal and the Hosnian System was now visible, spread out in front of them.

‘Whoa.’

He couldn’t help himself. Space was empty. The galaxy might be home to millions of systems, but most of its 100,000 light years was empty black, sprinkled with the cold glitter of far-off suns. Even flying around home, all he needed to do was get to the edge of the system for Yavin 4 to be a dot in the viewport, and for the Yavin gas giant to look like a red marble, so small you had to squint to tell it apart from the tendrils of the Seagrass Nebula away in the distance.

Not here, though. The Hosnian System only had five inhabited planets, but Poe was sure he’d never seen a busier expanse of space. There were space stations, satellites, the pulsating lights of beacons and hyperspace comm relays, the twinkling of ships getting into busy traffic lanes. Somehow, it was beautiful, and in the mid-distance, the lights of Hosnian Prime shone in the planet’s inky dark like a cloud of glow bugs.

‘What’s the matter, kid?’ Eeana said at his side, not unkindly. ‘Never seen a star system before?’

‘Not like this,’ he said.

She edged out of her chair and patted his shoulder. ‘You’ll get used to it, starfighter.’

‘I hope so,’ he said, but his attention was already elsewhere, on the cloud-dappled blue of Hosnian Two, a small ball closer to the yellow-orange sun. He was going to spend the next four years of his life on that world and he could almost see it, swirls of water vapour parting under a hull to reveal an ocean, a city. He glanced at the fuel gauge, a little battered but still readable, then at the specs in the ship’s tag. In a few moments, he was going to have to contact the Hosnian centre control. One of the nav computer’s screens helpfully reminded him that the automated course would end in approximately three minutes.

Back at Alba Davot Spaceport in Yavin, his father had told him ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

‘I should blow up a Death Star’s shield generators. Got it.’

‘Why am I sending you off to study? You’re already too smart as it is,’ Kes had said, then added, smiling lopsidedly and looking a little embarrassed all at once, ‘and that was someone else, anyway.’

‘General Solo and Senator Organa.’

‘It was “Princess” back then.’ His father’s expression had softened back to its usual state, quiet and sad. ‘Be careful out there, OK, buddy?’ he’d said before he’d pulled in Poe for a hug and a goodbye kiss. ‘I mean it.’

Well, this wasn’t not being careful. Not _really_.

‘Ma’am—Eeana,’ Poe said. ‘I just had an idea. Not sure if you’re going to like it.’

He turned to her in time to see her make a sour expression and give him a look so old-fashioned it was probably buried under a Massassi palace. ‘This was supposed to be a no-funny-business kind of deal,’ she said, the tips of her lekku bristling.

‘It is. I’m just thinking, how about we land on Hosnian Two instead of Hosnian Prime? I really need to get there as soon as I can and I’m sure you’ll be able to find a pilot. Probably charging less than in Hosnian Prime.’ He had no idea about the going rates for pilots in any part of the Hosnian System, but it made sense, at least in his head.

‘Oh, that’s what you were so scared to ask?’

‘I wasn’t sca—’

‘Sure, Hosnian Two, Hosnian Prime, all the same to me, kid. But looks like we’ll be landing on Prime anyway.’ She nodded with her chin towards the control panel in front of Poe. ‘Don’t think we have enough fuel for Two.’

‘We do if we slingshot. We’re at 20% fuel, right?’

‘Eh, probably seventeen, that gauge’s a bit skugged.’

‘Fifteen, then. I can get us there with less than ten.’ He nodded towards the main viewport and tried to sound helpful. ‘See? It’s a clean shot, we just go straight towards—’

She snorted. ‘Trust me, you don’t have to tell me how a gravity slingshot works.’

His face grew hot. ‘Sorry. I’m sure you’ve flown plenty of them.’

She didn’t answer right away, and was instead silent and drawn for a moment. Poe let the ship drift towards one of the outer traffic lanes.

‘What the hell,’ Eeana finally said. ‘Maybe I’m an idiot, but you’ve flown us this far and you’re not even half bad. Do it. I’m sure you’re good enough to shoot us around Hosnian Prime.’

He grinned. ‘Yeah, I’m good enough.’

‘And modest, too,’ she said, but this time Poe was pretty sure they were both in on the joke.

‘All right, I’ll fly a holding pattern while you talk to the passengers. I bet they won’t m—’

Eeana reached for the ship’s internal speaker system before Poe could get the rest of the sentence out.

‘Dear passengers, this is your head and currently only mechanic speaking, we’ll be landing on Hosnian Two instead of Hosnian Prime, thank you and good day.’ She cut off the comms and settled back into her chair. ‘There. Passengers talked to.’ Disapproval must be showing in Poe’s face, because she added ‘What? Their tickets are good for a shuttle to Hosnian Prime and they’re even getting there early. Bargain, if you ask me.’

Well, he didn’t think he could argue with that. He focused on the ship’s controls again. ‘Let’s do this.’

He couldn’t help but sound a little excited, but when he got in touch with them, the system centre controller’s voice sounded bored enough to put a damper on anything. ‘ _One Taar_ niner-four-delta, cleared for IF to Hosnian Two OP space, grav assist two-four-zero Hosnian Prime orbit,’ she said, the words a little fuzzy from the hyperspace relay, ‘confirm channel three-six-echo for Hosnian Prime traffic.’

 _And if you blow yourself up, make sure to sweep your ashes out of the way_ , Poe added inside his head, then forgot about anything that wasn’t the ship and the space around him as he fired up the booster engines and flew a straight shot towards Hosnian Prime, the hulk of a space station far below his hull like some huge animal at the bottom on an ocean. The ship felt clunkier than ever and its pull to the left became strong enough to make his hands hurt as they held on to the steering yoke, but none of that mattered. He was up in the black, flying closer and closer to the light-dotted night of Hosnian Prime, and he couldn’t think of anything better in the entire galaxy.

They had just reached low orbit, the curve of the planet taking up the bottom half of the viewports, when an alarm started blaring.

+++++++

**TBC…**

**Author's Note:**

> Poe’s parents, Shara Bey and Kes Dameron, both fought for the Rebel Alliance, Shara as a pilot and Kes as a ground infantryman. He also called people “buddy” unironically. A lot of the things in this fic (languages, institutions, procedures, etc) are based on RL equivalents. However, to quote Harrison Ford, it’s fake and in space. In other words, while some elements are based on things I am intimately familiar with, I apologise in advance to, say, any actual pilots who may wander in for what I’m sure are thirty-five chapters of terrible inaccuracies. :)
> 
> (On a completely different note, if anyone who is reading this is waiting for the next chapter of _The Replacement_ , I am very, very sorry for how long it’s taking me to update the fic. I have in fact been working on the story, including on multiple future chapters. Unfortunately, and without giving any spoilers away, I have a lot of problems with some of the plot developments in CA:CW, particularly regarding the fates of certain characters, and while obviously _The Replacement_ is an AU and what happens in the canon doesn’t really matter, at the moment these plot developments are making it very hard for me to engage with the MCU at all for personal reasons I won’t go into here. I can’t say if that will change once I’ve watched the film and have had time to digest it; I hope so, but for now I have to take what’ll hopefully be a temporary break from that universe for the sake of my own mental health. I do apologise and I hope you’ll understand.)


End file.
